Anyone has experience with advertisements in Android games? I am working on enabling ads from admob.com - chose them because they seem like the most established provider with the most accessible technical framework. If anyone else has played around with ads I would love to hear about your experiences!

I've used AdMob for all my ads, primarily because it seems to be the only game in town for Android. I've signed up for AdSense's mobile beta program, but have gotten no reply.

I'm not getting rich from Android development (and from what I hear nobody is right now). But I've posted some figures on my blog, which you can find from my business website. Basically I'm making about $300-400/month on all my apps combined, and just about half of that revenue comes from ads.

Integrating the ads into apps with AdMob is relatively easy. If you can't get questions answered from FAQs or online resources, shoot me an email. Unfortunately, the way I implement them in most games is likely not optimal. I serve up ads in dialog boxes between parts of games (e.g. hands in card games). People are often curious, but then get habituated to just dismissing the ad dialogue. Just as with sales, I get an initial spike in clicks, and a steep fall-off after about a week. At its peak, my ad revenue driven by my Spades game was over $20/day. I haven't released a game lately because I spent the summer working on an entry for the ADC II, so these days my ad revenue is in the $2-3/day range.

But my next project is focusing on multiplayer, and I plan on implementing ads in a hopefully more natural way that will lead to steady click-throughs.

martin / polycleaf , I am about to submit my first android game in the market (free though), and I signed up for admob, but i can't find the sdk . As far as I understand, they will only make it available after you submit you app . Is that true or I am missing something ? If that's true, that's pretty crappy , I wanted to plan (that is, code) everything before releasing the game .

What do you mean SwampChicken? You aren't required to have a business to develop android apps, or put ads in your apps.

As long as I don't make a million bucks with an app, I dont need to have a business here in Brazil . The problem is only if a lot of money start appearing on my bank account without a clear source . I dont believe that would happen anyway . And that should be the same in most of countries .

As for AdMob, I'm not really using them any longer. I signed up for the Google AdSense for Mobile Applications beta and got accepted, so I'm using them, and I'm very happy with the results so far. Not sure when they're going to make it out of beta, though.

In the states, you just need to report the money on your taxes as an independent contractor. It's pretty straightforward, although you've got to pay double social security. Typically if you make less than $700 a year then you don't need to worry about reporting it, but any more than that and you might have to fill out a 1099 form with Google, although I'm not sure about that.

Admob has been pretty steady since we launched. Very interesting with Google - just signed up too. We already have two ad providers - Admob and Quattro Wireless. But QW isnt really that interesting so we are planning to get rid of that again.

Kingaschi, sorry for not answering to your question, but how did u manage to be accpeted to google adsense beta ? as far as I read the register form, it says they only accept apps more than 1 million views/day .

I also make just a few cents/day with abmob but right now I'm looking at a ~130 impressions/day . So I think it's just normal to earn just a few if you have a few impressions . How many impressions you have /day ?

Kingaschi, I think the deal is that he has thousands of impressions per day . But I am actually surprised with the numbers from google adsense . I thought it would be better than admob's. Here are my numbers for the same month (for Hellevators with Admob) :

impressions : 3062clicks : 203revenue : 2.81

Maybe I should just stick with admob instead of going to google adsense ? Can you guys who have experience with both adsense and admob compare them?

Well, you generally only get revenue for clicks, so since you have x10 the number of clicks, you should be seeing better revenue since you have a higher click through.

Though $0.28 for 34 clicks does seem a little low; I've seen days with just as lousy rates on Admob (e.g., the past few days have been very poor), but without going through the numbers, I'm pretty sure that the average rates I've seen are better than that. Which is surprising, since Google is reputed to have a better "program" than the "competition".

As for what the best way to set up the ads are... I wish I knew. I try to think as a user; i.e., they must not be annoying to the user. As a result, I've tended to place ads on the bottom of views, and far from any buttons (you really don't want people accidentally touching the ad). But that's just me - I find it extremely annoying when there is a blinking banner ad on the top of the view.

Kingaschi, I think the deal is that he has thousands of impressions per day . But I am actually surprised with the numbers from google adsense . I thought it would be better than admob's. Here are my numbers for the same month (for Hellevators with Admob) :

impressions : 3062clicks : 203revenue : 2.81

Maybe I should just stick with admob instead of going to google adsense ? Can you guys who have experience with both adsense and admob compare them?

btw, Kingaschi , you didn't answer me about how to get adsense beta .

Yeah, he's right. I'm currently averaging about 150,000 impressions per day for all my apps combined. Revenue depends on a lot of factors, such as exactly how you are serving the ad, the keywords you're using (if the service you're using has keywords), and of course the arcane way in which advertisers actually bid for ad space.

I would also be curious to know if Kingaschi was actually accepted to the AdSense beta, and if so, how. The requirements are that you need to be able to serve up in the range of 100,000 impressions per day minimum.

If what you're actually doing is using AdSense for mobile websites in your app (e.g. by serving them up in a webview), this is a big no-no and may result in you getting your AdSense account suspended. There was a case last year where this happened to another dev.

Those looking into serving ads in their apps may want to check out MobClix. I'm been experimenting with them in a couple of my less popular apps. Integration was fairly easy, and serving your own house ads was also very easy. However, as far as I can tell, you have far less control over targeting (e.g. you don't set keywords as in AdSense).

I also saw a while back that GreyStripe had opened up a beta for Android, though I have no experience with them.

Those looking into serving ads in their apps may want to check out MobClix. I'm been experimenting with them in a couple of my less popular apps. Integration was fairly easy, and serving your own house ads was also very easy. However, as far as I can tell, you have far less control over targeting (e.g. you don't set keywords as in AdSense).

Thanks for that info; please let us know how it works out. Lack of keywords seems like a bad thing. It's not as if click through rates are high to begin with.

So we finally got accepted and got up and running on Google AdSense. So far it is disappointing though - we only have a CTR of about .3% whereas admob and QW can get to 2%. Anyone else have similar experiences? Maybe we are doing something wrong - it sounds very low to me...

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